People working together in traditional workgroups at a single worksite, or perhaps a few closely neighboring worksites, receive many cues about each other's availability and communications preferences by direct observation, inquiry, and experimentation. In such co-located workgroups, people learn by such cues when co-workers generally arrive, leave, and take breaks and meals, whether they are present in their office, busily working, attending a meeting, talking on the telephone, and other activities and conditions.
Co-located colleagues thus have many cues to know when colleagues are most likely available and unavailable for intercommunication, and what modes of communication are best for interacting with them. Members of traditional co-located workgroups frequently make accurate assumptions based on such cues and thus, with a shared sense of collegial time, to interact effectively with co-workers. However, recent developments in work life have made it harder to have such a shared sense of time among colleagues.
Flexible work hours, long commutes, and other factors have contributed to less uniform work hours among colleagues. Additionally, more people are also telecommuting (e.g., working from their home), working from satellite work sites, and even working from mobile locations while traveling or using laptop computers and/or handheld devices. Besides these developments, the growth of networking technologies and recent trends in increasing distributed siting of work forces exacerbates the problem. Further, the growth of networking is promoting more groups of people increasingly working together from different locations as distributed groups.
Many modern work groups are distributed across geographical sites, which makes them physically remote. Such distributed work sites may be so remote from each other they are perhaps shifted across time zones. Globalization complicates this even further, with members of the same work group on different continents and separated by large shifts in time, such as some members experiencing night while others are experiencing day. Under such circumstances, cultural factors may also complicate the situation.
All of these factors make it harder for work groups to have a shared awareness of the temporal rhythms and work habits of their colleagues. Being distributed across space and time zone and the concomitant disruption of shared work rhythm awareness can make it harder for group members to coordinate their activities and find opportune times to contact each other. Distributed and mobile co-workers do not receive cues that members of co-located groups routinely share. Thus, distributed and mobile co-workers lack the information provided, for example, by the cues co-located colleagues use to determine when and with what media to best contact remote colleagues.
The information regarding when and with what media to best contact distant or remote colleagues is not limited in usefulness to coworkers who are known to each other. Another problem faced in the modern work place is initiating contact with a person the initiator has not yet met, or with whom the initiator is unfamiliar. Initiating contact with such an unfamiliar person can be awkward because the initiator may lack sufficient information about the unfamiliar person's availability and/or their preference for and responsiveness to the variety of possible communication media. The lack of information on the preference for and responsiveness to the variety of possible communication media may be aggravated by variables such as time of day, relationship to sender, message priority, and others.
Conventional approaches to providing information regarding collegial time, presence, and communication preferences to distributed coworkers includes the use of video, audio, snapshots, and more recently Web-based cameras (Webcams) to provide shared awareness for distributed work groups. However, initializing such contacts remains problematic, because such virtual presence techniques still suffer from time sensitivity issues shared by distributed work groups.
The use of some recent technologies have helped restore some awareness cues for work groups. For one example, audio, visual, and gyro sensors have been proposed as wearable input sources for memory prosthesis and/or electronic journals. This technique allows the detection of significant changes in scene. However, these techniques are proposed for individuals.
Another example is the predicting one's mental “state of availability”, that is, how receptive they might be to being interrupted, based on “machine learning” algorithms. This technique employs the accumulation of data that will be internally analyzed and a “yes” or “no” answer may be provided in response to asking a question regarding the state of the data. However, the state of the model is hidden or internalized and not apparent in this technique.
For another example, on-line calendars have come into widespread use and sharing group access to each other's calendars plays a role in coordinating group activities. However, impromptu and ad hoc calendar changes may not be fully promulgated to the rest of the work group rapidly enough to provide the needed information. Instant messaging (IM) at work has helped restore some sense of awareness among distributed workers, and made it easier to establish contact with each other. However, IM requires both parties be on-line simultaneously to effectuate intercommunication between them.
Previous research has been performed using Bayesian networks that include time along with other factors to construct models of a person's likely location or availability. While a Bayesian network can show factors that might contribute to a prediction, it does not describe changes in a factor's influence over time.
One problem with the conventional art is that scheduling and initiating contact is subject to the same time sensitivity issues confronting distributed workgroups in general. Specifically, when is the best time and what is the most promising communications medium to use to reach another person to schedule time together or by which to initiate contact? Another problem with the conventional art is that some conventional techniques are subject to being rendered ineffective or inaccurate by impromptu or ad hoc schedule changes which may not be sent in a timely manner to all group members relying on the information. The conventional art is also problematic because many rhythmic patterns do not conform to common parametric statistical distributions used to construct predictive models.